Around this time last year I had my heart broken by a man I loved with everything in me. When I say ‘broken’, I mean it. My experience with that man literally broke me apart and I completely lost myself in Grief.
I have grieved relationships and people lost from my life before but this time was different. This time Grief took me over and I fell to the bottom of huge pit of despair where I stayed for what seemed like an interminable period. I cried every day for months and months. I raged at the world and at him. I went to places so dark in my mind that I thought I would never make it out alive. Grief was a bitch that would not let me go.
She was with me every moment and, as I writer, my only recourse was to pour my pain onto a page. I wrote 70,000 words between January and May. Then something unexpected happened; the prose turned to poetry. It felt like Grief cracked open this whole new part of me and poetry fell out. It was strange and also so very relentless. Grief was a demanding client. She demanded I write and write even when tired, emotionally spent and physically exhausted. I had to write. It all had to come out.
The muse was my therapist and my words, catharsis. When I read those words now they often seem like they were written by someone else. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes my words impress me and I ask myself, ‘Did I really write that?’ Those words hold an essence and a depth that wasn’t in me 18 months ago. I can thank Grief for that.
She held me close and I held her closer. She defined me and I let her. Then our relationship took an unexpected twist when, after about six months, Grief left me to find another soul to torment. She had penetrated every part of me and her departure left an emptiness behind; a space to be filled by something or, perhaps, someone else.
I didn’t realise she was leaving until after she’d gone. Grief had been my constant companion and influencer. Her occupation of my life was something I dreaded daily but she was also a dragging weight I’d carried willingly for months. Then suddenly, I was free.
I don’t know if I let go of Grief or she let go of me. Maybe it was a combination of both. It felt weird not to have her around. But I couldn’t hold onto her or the pain anymore. I couldn’t stay in that place of torment. It was time to move on.
Some people say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I don’t know about that. All I can say is, although I never, ever want to be hurt like that again, I know the experience showed me parts of myself I didn’t know existed. Grief was a hard taskmaster (okay, a complete bitch) but she taught me a lot about pain, creativity, what I’m capable of (the wonderful and awful, shameful parts) and my ability to just keep going when I’d rather give up completely.
I don’t wish her to visit again. But I am thankful for the lessons Grief taught me because they helped me to become a wiser person, and a stronger writer.
‘I read your blog. There’s a lot of poetry on there,’ said You Know Who You Are.
I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. I can’t honestly tell you why or when I became a poet, but it seems that I am. On my last count I’d written around 150 poems since May and five of those have been written this week! It’s a seemingly never-ending stream of words, rhyme and rhythm that turns up and demands to be written. So I write it.
Like the rest of my writing, my poems are very autobiographical so I need to be a little circumspect in what I publish here on my blog. Social media and the online world is so very open and everyone can know your business (exes and current lovers included) and words can be misinterpreted, too revealing or understood perfectly (horror oh horror). Other times I publish immediately, unable to keep it to myself, but then worry that I have revealed too much (oh the mortification!). Nevertheless, if you read all my poems you would see the outline of my life – its ups and downs, twists and turns and yes, let’s face it, the times when I’ve fallen flat on my face. It’s all there in those poetic words that just won’t leave me alone.
The tone of these works inevitably rise and fall with the happenings in my personal life because they are all connected to love. Love – whether it’s causing a flood or a drought in my life – is always there. And, for those of you who know the tempestuous possibilities of that emotion, I’m sure you would agree with my statement that sometimes love can indeed, drive you to madness.
My poems, when they appear in my psyche and demand to be written, cover all aspects of that madness – the pain, the exhilaration, the gentleness, the devastation, the silence (the most cruel aspect and hateful aspect of all). Not to mention anger, passion and of course, sex (whether you actually have it or just think about having it…all the time!).
Love seems to me to be an inescapable thing. Ever-present and ever-persistent.
The wonderful thing about poetry though, is it helps me to release that madness within. Like many women, I tend to obsess, to cling to that emotional roller-coaster and manipulate every detail in my brain to try and understand just what happened or will happen or might happen. But my poetry perverts the course of this bad habit. It simply grasps all those emotions and forces me to throw them onto the page. The form is not of my design – I firmly believe that is coming from elsewhere. But it is my fingers that fly across the keyboard.
Afterwards I often feel spent, exhausted, sated, like after great sex (okay, incredible sex) or a good cry where your tears fall like torrents. I will wonder if the madness has left me then. I will wonder if there is more to write. How can there be more to say?
Inevitably though, the rhythm will return and I am drawn once again to the black keys on my Mac. Love will haunt me again – love lost, love wished for, love longed for – driving my fingers onwards.
It seems that love holds the soul of poetry for me. So for now, love is all I need, or at least the promise of what I thought it was, or what it could be.
She felt him holding her hand
Then he was gone
His touch had been light
Feather-like
Dancing streams of daylight
In her world
Then gone
Taken
Removed without heart it seemed
She thought about that hand later
And wondered why
He’d ever held hers at all
Strange to think of that now
Much later
A recurring thought
It’s true
Holding someone’s hand
And believing it could be true
But a hand is not a relationship
That requires much more
Although it seemed like
Wait, none of that
They were satellites
Nothing more
Another time
Another place
Another shore
Can’t wait
Wanting more
Just a hand
Offering less
Confusion
Just a test
Hating this
A tide needs more than a hand
To guide it back to shore.
Around this time last year I had my heart broken by a man I loved with everything in me. When I say ‘broken’, I mean it. My experience with that man literally broke me apart and I completely lost myself in Grief.
Not a word could be heard
The Facebook post it asked of me
‘I read your blog. There’s a lot of poetry on there,’ said You Know Who You Are.
He’d stopped believing
She felt him holding her hand